Colleges and universities are typically challenged with managing the logistics of a large student body. With sometimes tens of thousands of students registering for courses in a single semester, it becomes difficult to maintain an organized and efficient process. Campus space is also often used for extracurricular and community events, which can further complicate scheduling. Room capacity, audience size, co-occurring events, and necessary features like projectors and Internet connection all have to be factored into the course registration and events organization process.

A large university recently had an in-house reporting solution with legacy data stores that were difficult to access. Modern embedded BI and reporting solutions couldn’t easily connect to these data stores without custom built connectors and some level of professional services. The JReport team was tasked with building an XML interface as part of an in-depth PoC in which any embedded BI solution could externally interface with the data.

Using JReport, the university was able to report on classroom scheduling for 60,000 students per semester. The reporting functionality also helped organize campus community events, extracurricular activities, and day/night commuter classes resulting in less personnel needed to perform manual organizational work. This freed up administrative employees to focus on other tasks and to better attend to student and community needs.

For universities, it’s critical that the reporting and scheduling functionality is easy enough to be used by non-technical end users, including admins and students registering for courses. By deploying embedded BI, universities empower users to run reports and schedule their resources in a self-service manner. Embedded BI even provides for data security, enabling report access control restrictions and user permission policies.

Higher education institutions can now provide better resource scheduling, coordination, and planning through embedded reports and dashboards that give deeper insights into the behaviors and needs of their student body.

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